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There are albums that use their opening remarks to savagely waylay the listener with the grand scope and vision of what they’re about to experience. Gulfer’s second full-length, Dog Bless, is the opposite of all that, if you take Vincent Ford at his word. “I’m not going out/I’m staying right here in my basement/I’m just gonna chill and maybe write a song about it,” are the first lines he sings on “Secret Stuff.” The Montreal quartet spends the next half-hour discussing boredom, growing older, and whether writing songs about boredom and growing older will ever amount to much of anything. Sometimes they add some beer-buzzed group harmonies, and their jittery melodies are often punctuated by a flurry of two-handed tapping or the rhythm section making as many stutter-steps and backflips as many times as possible while staying in 4/4. All of which underlines the real point Ford is making on “Secret Stuff”: Gulfer is one of the last revival-style (aka “2011”) emo bands standing, and their frankly audacious and righteous belief is that this form of music is something you can spend a lifetime growing into and growing old with.

The emotional tenor of Dog Bless is of a piece with Gulfer’s previous work, honoring the genre’s tradition of communicating with itself. “I never thought I’d be so tired at my age,” Ford sang on the 2013 EP Transcendals, and five years later, “Secret Stuff” pledges, “I’ll stay the same old man.” On “Jurassic Spark,” another song from that 2013 EP, he admitted, “It’s just fun being bored and high/I still enjoy to be ignored sometimes.” This time around, though, that nonchalant quality has the potential to curdle into stubbornness and shame: “I’m stuck in the house/I’m always high/The bottom line is, ‘amaze me again,’” he sings on “Fading.”

Gulfer have said that “Fading” was inspired by watching elderly men play bocce and smoke cigarettes in the park, as satisfied as anyone could be about their station in life. Dog Bless strives towards that level of self-acceptance, while struggling to find the beauty and humor in servicing a cult audience after a span of time in which many promising bands completed their entire career arcs. Phrases like “I sometimes recall that no one gives a shit,” “Whatever it takes to be alive,” and “We got annoyed by everyone” are vented and repeated until they transmogrify into inside jokes.

As suggested by the theme of “Doglife,” three years of your twenties can feel seven times as long, and where Gulfer’s earlier work could get by on sheer energy, Dog Bless manages to show its work without feeling overdone. “Doglife” and “Baseball” have moments that could have been repurposed as foolproof hooks, but the band would rather not. The memories those songs speak on are meant to be fleeting, overpowering, and unexpected.

And of course bands in this realm tend to be short-lived. Even beyond the emotional and physical intensity, this kind of music is often just a tough sell outside of house shows: Typically, there’s too much math, not enough heart, too much tapping, not enough riffs, too much yelping, not enough tunes. Gulfer’s genre has never once been considered cool. But they’ve stuck with a variant of indie rock that sublimates that self-doubt without undermining itself, perfectly suited to soundtrack the mental push and pull of advancing age. They’re good at alternately embracing stasis and rejecting it, trying to will something exciting into existence and being OK if the process doesn’t bring results—the three interludes of melancholy chillwave synths are called “Blessed.”

All these thematic depths are more or less summed up in that first verse of “Secret Stuff,” especially in the way Ford says it. Every time he sings the word “I,” it’s in that corrugated-but-not-metal melodic scream that’s served as emo’s version of the millennial whoop or vocal fry as a genre identifier. (I dunno, the Kinsella Croak?) Yeah, he’s saying “I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I”, but it’s meant to be doubled and tripled until it means something broader, closer to “we.”

It’s the kind of sound that re-emerged when Gulfer was first getting started, when, as one of Ford’s peers has put it, “Everything went back into the basement.” (Another musician from this scene described it as “Really bad, wussy emo rock 10 years after it was relevant.”) The self-deprecation inherent in those statements courses throughout Dog Bless, but so does the love. When Ford sings “Secret Stuff,” it’s a tribute to Gulfer themselves, and also the fallen in Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing, Hightide Hotel, the Brave Little Abacus, Marietta, the Clippers, Everyone Everywhere, Joie de Vivre, Donovan Wolfington, You Blew It!, and countless others who sparkled and faded so records like this one could live.